A Princess of the Aerie (25 page)

“Shadow,” Dujuv said, “you mentioned that you thought the kids were nice, uh, the way kittens are nice, masen?”

“Yes, Dujuv.”

“Well, this is a stupid question—I know the Rubahy keep some Earth animals as pets, rabbits, cats, ferrets, and pigs I’ve
heard of … does your species have pets of your own?”

Shadow whistled a low resonant blat, equivalent to a deep sigh. “We did have pets. But the invasion fleet did not bring pets,
and when the human secret weapon sent Alpha Draconis nova, everything back there burned. We might have salvaged DNA, but as
you know, the Beyobathu sued for our homeworld as a salvage-of-war planet, and they pull much influence with the Galactic
State. They got court permission and had already sterilized our homeworld, to improve their case that it was available for
salvage, before we even found out that there was a court. So we have a few meat animals, cloned from frozen samples in the
invasion’s food lockers. Nothing we kept as pets.”

Jak had seen pictures of Beyobathu; they were sort of two-headed plesiosaurs, supposedly sole proprietors of one whole globular
cluster, with almost a billion years of recorded history. “Isn’t one of the judges on the Galactic Court a Beyobathu?”

“Yes. He has promised to be fair.” Jak was always amazed at how much irony a being with no facial expressions could communicate.
“Anyway, yes, we had pets. Especially the elawathil, which I suppose you would say looked like a half-sized, short-necked
ostrich. They had some of the loyalty and playfulness of your dogs, but could talk a little, like your parrots, and were about
as bright as your dolphins. They co-evolved with us—one of our great poets says that ‘elawathil and Rubahy were together before
we were ourselves.’ In a thousand of your years, we have not ceased to miss to them.”

The table fell quiet. Then Shadow on the Frost said, “But I am spoiling the gathering! Someone start some fun, please!”

As if on cue, Tlokro, one of the kobolds, came in with a gigantic bowl of chocolate pudding, announcing that there was plenty.
Jak had filled up on stew, so he had only one bowl of the pudding, but everyone else seemed to put away at least three or
four bowls. “Wonder what their calorie demand is like around here,” Jak murmured to Dujuv.

“Something like mine, I bet. Toktru, Jak, it may be hell, but the food is wonderful. And I haven’t seen a fat Mercurial yet,
either—the big-boned people really
are
just big-boned. They must exercise.”

Kyffimna, who had been sitting next to Dujuv quietly for the whole meeting, made a strange sputtering noise that sounded exactly
like a woman trying to suppress a giggle so that she won’t spew chocolate pudding through her nose. “Oh, yes, Dujuv. Plenty
of that.” She rested a hand lightly on his arm. Dujuv sat up as if shocked. It was Jak’s turn to work on controlling his pudding.
Obviously it was tricky stuff.

After dessert they passed big jugs of a heavy-bodied, thick red wine, laced with soporifics, painkillers, and euphorics; it
didn’t taste like much but the effect made up for it. Everyone older than toddlers got roaring drunk, musical instruments
came out, and the chamber rang with laughter and singing in harmony in the echoing vaulted main chamber of the krilj.

These people definitely deserved a better break,
Jak thought,
and I have no idea how to get it for them.

Soon wine and comfort took their toll. After smaller children and older adults had drifted off to their chambers, and the
stories—mostly about accidents in which people had been killed, as far as Jak could tell, with a leavening of tales of people
caught having sex in odd circumstances—began to ramble and repeat, Durol said, “Well, before we tire them out any further,
I guess there’s a little conversation that I ought to have privately with Jak, Dujuv, and Shadow. Kyffimna, I need you in
it too, since you’re my second in command, and then I guess I want Bref in case we need to look at some computer stuff.”

An older boy or younger man (his face was young and blotchy but he was tall, the neck that stuck out of his pressure suit
collar was long and skinny but the shoulders were wide), said, “And me too, please? I should know too.”

Durol resisted a smile. “Narav, if I tried to exclude you, you’d just listen at the door. And besides, you’re right, as a
family thing, you should get used to going where your sister and brother go, and seeing what they’re responsible for. Say
Kyffimna and I get drunk one night and knife each other, you might be second in command.”

Narav looked like he wanted to complain about the teasing, but he just said, “Thanks,” perhaps because he was grateful to
be included.

They gathered around the screen in the little domed chamber that was Durol’s office, lounging on the mats on the floor, and
Durol said, “All right, so we aren’t going to solve this with a battalion of B&Es, which would work. So we’re back to using
what we have at hand, plus whatever advantages we can get from two apprentice spies and an experienced mercenary that the
other side probably doesn’t know we have yet.”

“It might help our guests to have some idea how all this happened,” Bref said, “and some of what we already know.” He was
about seventeen or eighteen, Jak guessed, filled in more than his rawboned brother, with a quieter, more serious affect.

“Give it to them. I’m going to go get us all some cocoa. Just realized this little meeting might go an hour. Would’ve started
sooner if I’d thought of it.” Durol lurched up and through the door, muttering about getting old.

“Pay no attention to the old gwont,” Bref said, “he’ll make it to a hundred and twenty. He’s too tough and mean to go sooner.”

Dujuv glanced at Jak as if he’d been stung; Jak nodded. To a hundred and twenty? That was middle-aged … or it was everywhere
they had ever been. Jak saw that Kyffimna had noted the look that passed between them and didn’t look happy about it.

“Anyway,” Bref said, “it’s easy enough to tell. Just over a year ago—Earth year, of course, not our little bitty Mercury years—we
were getting a little broke because prices had been kind of low, and we’d had a magma accident where one of our fifteen-wheelers
ended up slagged—”

“I’m still real sorry about that,” Narav said, “but it was a perfectly understandable accident, and—”

“Brother, I wasn’t going to mention you at all, till you brought it up.” He glanced sideways at Jak. “And Narav’s right, could’ve
happened to anybody, ain’t his fault, ain’t anyone’s. You want to fault anyone, you fault that Safe-world Mercurial Insurance,
because they decided it was twenty percent negligence so what they did was, they gave us thirty percent of the payout as a
loan instead of cash money, and that put us over the line so that other creditors started jacking rates and payments and all
on the variable loans.

“Anyway, we were in some trouble, not bigger than trouble we’d had before, but trouble, so we leased the other side of the
crater, a hundred-and-twenty-degree slice of just the rim wall, to MLB, which at the time just looked like a new startup labor
company. After two generations in this crater we knew there wasn’t much over there, and we told ’em, but they wanted it anyway.
Well, less than a hundred hours after they got here, they were doing all kinds of things in the central pinnacle, which they
hadn’t rented at all, so Pop went over to tell them that he didn’t like squatting, and they shot the two heets he took with
him, and gave him a beating. Which is actually why he walks that way, not because he’s getting old.

“Then they showed him that they’d bought up about three-quarters of our debt—I guess they just shot Prano and Bleron, and
gave him the beating first, for fun, because they already knew they had his nutsack in their visegrips—but being our friends
and all, they were prepared to offer us a way out. They made us their subsidiary, took a hundred percent control, and we get
out just as soon as we pay off all the loans, which at current rates ought to be about seventy-five years. We stopped discussing
the central pinnacle, and since then they’ve built that into a regular fortress. And nobody from here, even though theoretically
we’re their landlord, has been allowed to have a look at what they’re doing on their side of the crater wall, but I can tell
you anyway.”

He raised his left hand, pulled off his suit glove, faced his purse toward him, and probed and spoke to it.

“We got you one of those over-the-suit-glove ones,” Narav pointed out.

“
Radzundslag
got it. Gets everything, sooner or later, masen? Now quiet for a second, so I can get this display up.”

The screen lit up and a set of columns appeared; on one side, there was a list of family names—or rather quacco names, Jak
realized—including “Eldothaler,” this quacco. Then there was a list of metals, with masses and prices listed; and then a column
of zeros. To the right was a list of “Metals sold, MLB” which listed about the same masses and much higher prices.

“It’s like this,” Bref said. “One of the few Treaty Laws we have here that’s any good is that the quacco that extracts the
metal has to get eighty-five percent of the price of that metal when it’s sold offplanet—which is defined as actually received
and paid for at the other end, up at the Hive or the Aerie or Ceres or wherever. Or another way to look at it is that all
the middlemen combined aren’t legally allowed to get more than fifteen percent. It tends to encourage direct buying between
industry out there and mining back here, which is good for both—lowers their prices and raises ours.

“Now, on the books, it looks like we’ve sold everything to MLB for the past few months, at way below market prices, and they
should only be able to go up fifteen percent on what they’ve paid us. But supposedly none of that cheap metal we were forced
to sell them has been resold. Just suspiciously similar quantities have been sold—at much higher prices—by MLB.

“Now, the way the enforcement works is, there’s a trace isotope mix, registered and recorded, that every quacco puts into
each metal lot before we deliver. The central office assigns each mix, so that every metal lot ever shipped is unique, and
theoretically even if it’s melted down, the stuff stays labeled.”

Jak asked, “What if someone melts metal from a bunch of different batches, mixes it, and sells that?”

Narav laughed. “My brother can give you a very patronizing lecture on that subject, like he did me. ‘Because, Slag-in-Your-Skull,
you can’t sell it legally unless it matches one of your assigned tracer mixes, and metal from mixed lots will always have
a bunch of tracers in it that you weren’t assigned, so the only way to resell stolen metal is to put it all through isotope
separation, clean it completely, and then put your tracer in it.’ Which is why Bref thinks they’re probably not even mining
over on the other side of the crater.”

“My guess is,” Bref said, “that what they wanted there wasn’t rocks, but empty space—there are a bunch of very big chambers
we never filled in over there, places where we did a lot of extracting the last time tin was high-priced, and instead of refilling
we dumped waste magma onto the crater floor. Huge spaces that would be perfect as a place to hide their isotope separators
for three reasons: plenty of flat crater floor nearby to spread the solar collectors on, great big enclosed spaces to hide
the machines in, and since isotope separation is a slow process no matter what, lots of room to store the metal ingots until
you can get them converted. If you look at the dates in that table closely, it looks like they started out with about a three-month
lag between acquiring metal and selling it, and now it’s more like five months; I would bet they’re adding laser-centrifuge
and plasma spectrometer setups over there as fast as they can, but it’s not enough to process all the metal they’re grabbing
from sixty quaccos.”

“Isn’t that expensive?” Dujuv asked.

“Very, but they seem to have deep pockets, and meanwhile the shortage it’s creating is raising prices in the upper solar system.
In the long run it’s more revenue for them—what’s it worth to have a near-monopoly on practically all the industrial metals?”

Durol returned with a pitcher of cocoa that tasted as if it were an experiment to determine how much chocolate would saturate
a solution in heavy cream. “Well, so you heets all have the basics on it, then?”

“I think so,” Dujuv said. “How many people does MLB have?”

“Only around a hundred, but they’re dug in. None of ’em miners of any kind,” Kyffimna supplied, edging a little closer to
Dujuv. “Meet ’em in Bigpile and you know right away—these are pure thugs. Not tough or disciplined or smart enough to be in
a military outfit, but able to scare the hell out of miners.”

“We’re tough but not fighters,” Durol said. “We never really had much of a chance to learn. An injury that takes you off the
job is so expensive to your quacco that your pizos won’t let you fight. I don’t suppose you three trained fighters could make
much of a difference?”

“One-on-one, sure,” Jak said.

Dujuv nodded emphatically. “Any of us could tackle any one of them, but against ten not-too-trained goons, the three of us
might have a fifty-fifty chance, and that’s not—”

The two boys were snickering. “Now that’s a panth,” Narav said. “Last week, the two panths in our quacco were in a bar in
Bigpile, and they got to talking and decided to try going up against three MLBers, so they called ’em out right there in the
bar. And our panths got their butts handed to them. They’re both in the Uninsured Charity Hospital, right now. Nothing against
panths or anything, I mean I’ve grown up in the same krilj with ’em and all, but figuring odds, or any kind of figuring, isn’t
exactly their strong suit.”

“I am sitting in front of you,” Dujuv said, very quietly, “and I would rather you didn’t talk about panths in general as if
I were not here.”

Shadow made a strange, throat-clearing noise, and said, “Dujuv’s figuring is singing-on. Your two panths had no combat training,
and didn’t attempt surprise. If the three of us were to try to attack an MLB party of ten, we would hit from behind without
warning, each taking out one before the rest were fighting back. That’s down to seven. As you may have heard, my species is
faster and stronger, individually, than yours, and I am also proficient and brutal. I could probably eliminate at least three
more of them from the fight. That leaves four. Though he is only an unmodified human, Jak is skilled and practiced. He would
almost certainly eliminate his first opponent, and might get a start on his second. Dujuv is as skilled as Jak, and a panth;
he would take out one opponent quickly and entangle the other two in the losing game of trying to stop him. When Jak and I
finished our opponents, there would be only two of them, and three of us, and we’d overwhelm the last two easily. If their
numbers were much above ten, though, they would hold the advantage.